The Last Chieftains: Johannes and Helga Hoving

THE LAST CHIEFTAINS:
JOHANNES AND HELGA HOVING
H. ARNOLD BARTON
When Verner von Heidenstam wrote the history of the Swedish
people for Sweden's school children in 1908-09, he entitled his widely
read work S v e n s k a r n a och deras hövdingar (The Swedes and Their
Chieftains). Its underlying theme was that the Swedes were a
splendid race, capable of the highest deeds and greatest sacrifices,
provided that they had leaders capable of unifying and inspiring
them, as much through their strength of character as by the nobility
of the causes they served. There were many in Sweden who aspired
to such roles, not least Heidenstam himself, who gloried in the title,
"The National Poet" (Nationalskalden), ceremoniously bestowed upon
him in 1909. The great Swedish folk movements were each headed by
their venerated "seers and proclaimers of the Word."1 The phenome­non
was, of course, not unique to Sweden, but was characteristic of
the nineteenth-century Romantic view of history as the deeds of great
men writ large.
In Swedish America, too, the ideal of the hövding, or "chieftain,"
held its fascination, and the enthusiastic Swedish visitor Carl
Sundbeck indeed used that very term to describe its leadership in
1904. With the right leader, "the field-marshal, who saw the possibili­ties,
who knew his people, and who drove them on," the hero of G.
N. Malm's 1910 novel, Charli Johnson, svensk-amerikan, reflects, "it is
possible to carry out any great deed whatsoever, either at home or
abroad."2
Such early Swedish-American paladins as the Civil War colonel
Hans Mattson, Johan A. Enander, the editor of H e m l a n d e t in Chicago,
or Tufve Nilsson Hasselquist and Carl Aaron Swensson, Augustana
Lutheran pastors and college presidents, for instance, readily come to
mind. In contrast, the last of those who aspired to be chieftains in the
grand manner among America's Swedes, Dr. Johannes Hoving and
his wife Helga, are practically forgotten today, even by those well-versed
in Swedish-American history.
This circumstance is not without its irony, for although the better-known
Swedish-American leaders left to posterity some account of
5
their lives and work, their testimony seems meager indeed compared
with the five volumes of Dr. Hoving's autobiography, appropriately
entitled I svenskhetens tjänst (In the Service of the Swedish Heritage").
This massive work includes presumably every article the doctor ever
wrote and every speech he gave on Swedish-related topics in
America, as well as innumerable articles about him and his wife from
the Swedish and Swedish-American press.3
Johannes H o v i n g in 1 9 3 4 . ( F r o m J. H o v i n g , I svenskhetens tjänst, I I I . )
Johannes and Helga Hoving are all the more noteworthy since
neither came originally from Sweden. The son of parents from
6
Sweden, Johannes Hoving was born in 1868 in Finland, in the
traditionally cosmopolitan city of Viborg (Viipuri), near St. Peters­burg,
whose patrician class was traditionally conversant in German,
Swedish, Finnish, and Russian. Hoving spoke all four. In this
multilingual society, individual ethnicity was largely a matter of
choice. In his memoirs Hoving stated how in his youth he made his
commitment:
Already then I had the warm and intense feeling that my
Swedish language would be my most cherished inheritance
from the time of my forefathers and that all other languages
were nothing in comparison with Swedish. . . . The whole
struggle for Swedish language and culture, for which at that
time minds were as yet far from fully awakened, has through­out
my life since then inspired my heart and soul.4
After studying medicine in Berlin and Stockholm, he became a
physician in 1898.
His wife, Helga (née Adamsen), was born in Copenhagen of partly
Swedish but mainly Danish descent. She was raised in Stockholm and
had enjoyed a successful career on the Swedish stage before marrying
the Finland-Swedish doctor. In 1903, the couple was forced to flee
Finland, Hoving maintained, due to his opposition to the Russifi­cation
campaign in the Grand Duchy, since 1809 under the overlord-ship
of the tsar. When a brief stay in Sweden and a visit to Germany
and Austria did not bring to light any promising prospects, they
emigrated the same year to New York, despite Hoving's misgivings.
"Like everyone at that time," he later recalled, "I regarded America
as a land to which one should go only in case of extreme need, since
one was regarded as a freebooter, or something still worse, if one
ever went there to settle."5
Dr. Hoving entered medical practice in New York, where he and
his wife would remain until 1934. Within a few years, they became
passionately involved in those Swedish-related activities which would
become their main focus in America. These were so all-encompassing
that the visiting Swedish journalist Erland Richter doubted in 1923
that they had ever yet dreamed a dream in English. "If so," he added,
"they plead for absolution."6 Despite their origins, the Hovings
meanwhile seem to have shown no particular interest in either
specifically Finland-Swedish or Danish activities in America.
At the beginning of World War I, before America's entry, Johannes
Hoving was outspoken in his support of the German cause and
American neutrality; this in time brought unpleasant social conse-
7
quences. In 1915, while serving on the committee for the Swedish
section of an organization called the Friends of Peace, he was
instrumental in collecting over 32,000 Swedish-American signatures
for a peace petition, including the memberships of 81 lodges of the
Vasa Order of America. In 1916, the Hovings joined Vasa Order in
New York.7
H e l g a H o v i n g in Vingåker D r e s s , 1 9 2 6 . ( F r o m J. H o v i n g , I svenskhetens tjänst, I I . )
The St. Erik Lodge, which the Hovings helped to organize, became
the principal forum for their crusade in defense of svenskhet in
America, reinforced by an elite inner circle, S:t Eriks Förbundet (the
Saint Erik Society). In time, they also became active in, among other
8
things, the Swedish Cultural Society of America and the Jenny Lind
Association of New York. Their efforts, Johannes Hoving proudly
recalled, were not regarded kindly by many Swedish Americans, who
prematurely considered their cause a lost one.8
Dr. Hoving soon became a frequent, featured speaker at Vasa
Order and other Swedish-American functions in the Northeast, as
well as a contributor to both Swedish and Swedish-American
newspapers, particularly Nordstjernan in New York. He was con­vinced
that following the wartime hysteria, Swedish-American pride
and self-assertiveness were once again on the rise. He was thus
strongly critical of the Swedish-American churches, especially of the
Augustana Lutheran Synod, for their weak-willed concessions in the
language question; in his view, their historic mission was at least as
much cultural as spiritual. He therefore placed his greatest hopes in
the secular societies, above all the Vasa Order, which he wished
might ultimately unify the whole Swedish-American community,
while serving as the new bulwark of Swedish language and culture.9
Dr. Hoving stated his credo perhaps most succinctly in January
1921 at a Vasa lodge meeting in Brooklyn:
Common descent has united all who have the same language,
the same cultural development, and the same historic memo­ries.
He need not be regarded as a worse Swede, who by Fate's
decree has been born in a land or part of the world other than
Sweden, so long as he or she is of Swedish blood and has
Swedish interests.
To add emphasis to this assertion, he spoke of the unshakable loyalty
of the ancient Swedish element in Finland and Estonia, which in
Sweden so greatly inspired the "All-Swedish" ideal of the Society for
the Preservation of Swedish Culture in Foreign Lands (Riksföreningen
för svenskhetens bevarande i utlandet)—hereafter the RFSBU— estab­lished
in 1908 and its revered chieftain, Professor Vilhelm Lund­ström.
10
In 1921, Helga Hoving established the Vasa Order's first children's
group, soon known as the Elsa Rix Children's Club, within the St.
Erik Lodge. This was followed shortly by the "Vårblomman" (Spring
Flower) Club in Brooklyn. Through the 1920s and 1930s the Hovings
became increasingly convinced that Swedish language and culture
could only be perpetuated by inculcating them at an early age. In this
regard, parents had a moral obligation, as Johannes Hoving declared
in a speech to the Swedish Engineers' Society in New York shortly
after the end of World War I.
9
By keeping to Swedish as their conversational language with
their children, parents are also able to maintain a certain
authority over them, for the children will only later, if they
make the effort, gain as great, or greater, proficiency in
Swedish than their parents have. If, meanwhile, we speak
English with them, they most often gain a certain ascendancy
over us and feel themselves superior, if, for instance, we do
not speak the proper American English they learn in school.
And in this way can the first unwitting step be taken in the
wrong direction . . . through false reasoning they may then get
the distorted idea that Sweden and everything Swedish are
inferior to everything American in other respects as well.11
Swedish children's clubs would provide a powerful support to
parental authority. Writing in Nordstjernan of the first public
performance by Helga's little group in January 1921, Hoving
explained:
In this manner, through Swedish children's songs, through the
recitation of the works of Swedish poets and authors, and
through the performance of Swedish folk dances and dance-games,
it will be possible to awaken the minds and hearts of
the children to the glories of the ancient Swedish culture—and
the children will not be lost to the Swedish heritage.12
For the Hovings, the preservation of Swedish language and
culture was a self-evident end in itself. Beyond that, Johannes
Hoving's thinking is somewhat unclear. Like many at the time, he
was much influenced by quasi-scientific theories of Nordic racial
superiority. In 1922 he enthusiastically hailed "the world's first
institute for racial biology" in Uppsala, under Professor Herman
Lundborg, the prophet of a movement present-day Swedes would
just as soon forget. Swedish Americans, he declared in a speech in
Worcester, Massachusetts, in July 1922, should change their thinking
about their own race, "so that we do not regard ourselves, for
instance, as closer to Americans of other racial origins than to those
of our own blood."13
In sum, he held, as he declared before the Vasa Lodge in Stam­ford,
Connecticut, in November 1922, that "we make this country, the
United States, a better and richer land, and the American nation, to
which we ourselves belong, a stronger and nobler nation by giving
it a Swedish element in its future development." To do this, however,
demanded that Swedish Americans keep their ancestral culture vital
10
and their blood strains pure.14
The Hovings' most memorable accomplishment was their
organizing and escorting three groups of young visitors from the
Vasa Order of America's children's clubs to "Father's and Mother's
Land" in 1924, 1929, and 1933, under the sponsorship of the RFSBU.
In contrast to the often guarded reserve encountered by ordinary
Swedish Americans who revisited their homeland during these years,
the youngsters received the most enthusiastic, indeed rapturous,
welcome in Sweden. In particular, the first group of 45 children form
the original New York and Brooklyn clubs, accompanied by several
mothers, created a sensation in 1924, as recorded not only by Dr.
Hoving but also by the former Swedish-American journalist Gunnar
Wickman.15
The purpose of this tour was explained by G. Hilmer Lundbeck,
head of the New York office of the Swedish-America Line, in a
circular letter to the Vasa lodges:
This ought to be a campaign of conquest by the Vasa Order in
old Sweden! Our children will take them by storm there at
home. Not because they can accomplish so much or teach them
back home anything they themselves cannot do much better,
but because they will see, there at home, that we here in
America keep up our traditions and wish to preserve our
Swedish heritage in the second, third, and fourth generations.16
Dressed in their Swedish folk costumes, the youngsters sang
Swedish songs and performed Swedish dance and "dance-games" to
large and appreciative audiences in many localities in Sweden. Little
Oscar Thorngren was a particular success when he recited in
Swedish:
I am but a little lad
and little wisdom have I gained.
But some day, when grown I am
And more have learned from Father and from Mother,
of the land where Viking sails have swelled
and the cradles of Caroline heroes stood—
of the land where steadfastness, honesty, and courage
are changeless as the Giant's realm. . . .
then will I—in tender tones and trumpet blast—
tell of Sweden, land of saga in the North!. . .17
On such occasions, there were few dry eyes in the house.
11
T h e H o v i n g s with the V a s a O r d e r c h i l d r e n at t h e John E r i c s o n m a u s o l e u m in F i l i p s t a d , 1 9 2 4 .
( F r o m J. H o v i n g , I svenskhetens tjänst, II.)
The Hovings and the Vasa children were widely feted. In 1924
they were received both by the primate of the Swedish state church,
Archbishop Nathan Söderblom, and by King Gustav V himself. To
"reconquer, linguistically and culturally" as many as possible of the
children of "overseas Swedes" must be a fundamental concern for all
Swedes, Professor Vilhelm Lundström, chieftain of the RFSBU,
declared, adding that the loving reception of the children in Father's
and Mother's land should "at least dispel the misconception that the
Swedish American is not received with open arms and warm heats
here at home."18
On numerous festive occasions, the children and their public were
addressed by local notables who underlined the significance of their
visit. "Swedish children!," the burgomaster of Marstrand, Nils von
Zweigbergh, declared:
Indeed, in the word Swedish lies all the deep meaning of our
warm greeting. . . . may you then, in the depth of your souls
remember that you are Swedish children and may you. . . feel
that, as one of our great skalds sings, "Sweden, Sweden,
Sweden, Fatherland" is also the "home of your yearning," your
12
home on earth."
"In you we. see homeland Swedes," the chairman of the RFSBU
chapter in Uddevalla, Captain Gustaf Uddgren, told them, "children
of our own stock, blood of our blood, flesh of our flesh.... And you
yourselves, young friends, as you now journey through our fair land
and often feel, as I hope, the presence of Sweden's ancient culture,
remember that this culture is your rightful inheritance as much as it
is ours." He called upon his young listeners never to forget that "you
also have strong roots in 'Father's and Mother's Land,' and that this
land feels about you and has the same demands upon you as if you
still belonged to it entirely and undividedly.""
In Gothenburg, Professor Vilhelm Lundström—at the time fiercely
critical of the Augustana Synod for its gradual abandonment of the
Swedish language—told the Vasa children that their visit overcame
the weariness he often felt, and gave him hope for the future of he
Swedish race, "now that we have found each other again."
In an article published in some twenty Swedish newspapers
following the group's return to America, Lundström expatiated upon
its significance. That "forty [sic] children of Swedish descent in the
second and third generations come to Sweden for the purpose of
showing that they have been brought up to feel solidarity with the
Swedish language and the Swedish motherland is something most
remarkable and promising for the future." They now returned as
"forty little prophets for the Swedish heritage" to homes where this
might have weakened, to reawaken their parents' slumbering love."
From this small beginning great things should come. The children's
tour should bring the Swedes at home to the realization that "the
spiritual reconquest of the three million overseas Swedes is the
greatest national task of our generation."20
The first Vasa children's tour indeed aroused much enthusiasm in
Swedish America, and especially within the Vasa Order, as witnessed
by the establishment after 1924 of numerous new Vasa children's
clubs throughout the United States. By 1929, when the Hovings led
their second group to Sweden, there were already 35 such clubs
throughout the country, and the participants came from several
states.
The second tour followed, generally, in the footsteps of the first
and enjoyed the same heartwarming success with the press and
public. The young visitors were delighted with Sweden. "When I first
set foot on my parents' ancestral soil," a girl from New York wrote
afterwards, "it was as if it were not a foreign country." Sweden, a
boy from Detroit wrote, "was the land of my dreams and I wanted
13
to go there. When I had seen it, I didn't want to come back to
America. I thought the time there was so short. And now I long only
to return to Sweden again."21
In his numerous speeches during the tour, Johannes Hoving
repeatedly expressed his conviction that the preservation of ancestral
language and traditions by America's immigrant groups was essential
for the maintenance of social order. The hard Americanization
campaign, which had caused much of the second generation to go
over entirely to English had destroyed parental influence, resulting
in tragic family conflicts and in some cases in the disillusioned return
of the parents to their homelands. Left to themselves, the children
from such families fell under evil influences, accounting for the fact
that "87%" of the crime committed in the United States was now
attributed to second-generation immigrants. A new approach to
America's immigrant population was therefore emerging.
Americanization must take place in such a manner that family
bonds are not broken. The immigrants' home languages should
be preserved and the children encouraged to hold to their
parents' languages, thereby serving as intermediaries between
the culture of their parents' old homelands and that culture
which is evolving in America.
For this reason, the Vasa children's clubs were now highly esteemed
and were steadily increasing.22
The 1929 Vasa children's tour coincided with the arrival in Sweden
of some 900 former inhabitants of the village of Gammalsvenskby in
southern Russia. The presence in the homeland of representatives of
the Swedish Diaspora from both East and West naturally called forth
editorial comment in the press. Johannes Hoving made a kind of
pious pilgrimage to visit the newly arrived villagers from the
steppe—these ultimate Swedes—in their camp in Jönköping. After
reflecting how their ancestors had first settled on the Estonian island
of Dagö during the Middle Ages, then migrated to southern Russia
in the eighteenth century, he marveled:
Despite the oppression their forefathers have been subjected to
through the centuries in Russia, they have not lost their
original nationality. Try to claim, then, that Swedish customs
and language cannot survive for centuries, even under
unbearable external and internal political circumstances!
When he told the refugees of efforts to uphold the Swedish
14
heritage in America, they warmly approved. "This, they considered,
ought to work for the Swedish Americans as well as they [them­selves]
had managed to succeed over the centuries." Here, surely,
Hoving saw his most cherished dream for the future of svenskhet in
America.23
"Does it, or does it not, have any significance whether our kinfolk
abroad keep, develop, and defend their Swedish characteristics, and
that they are proud of their Swedish origins?" Köpings-Posten asked,
apropos of the children's tour. "Indeed it does! That such is the case
is the most powerful proof of the vitality and inner strength of the
old Swedish culture and a demonstration that this culture can well
hold its place for generations in competition on foreign ground."24
These were cries from the heart at a time when the end of the
Great Migration meant that for coming generations, "Father's and
Mother's Land" would be A m e r i c a .
The 1930s witnessed the last great debate over the preservation of
the Swedish language in America, between Johannes Hoving and
Vilhelm Berger in New York. Dr. Hoving naturally represented the
traditional ideal of ethnic maintenance in America. In a speech given
in New York in 1930, and printed in several Swedish-American
newspapers, he sternly took his compatriots in America to task for
failing, in their complacency, to rally in a great common effort to
uphold their language and heritage. He berated the churches for their
refusal to "cooperate" in this regard. He meanwhile categorically
opposed the establishment of English-speaking Vasa lodges to attract
the younger generations.
For as soon as we have created such English-speaking lodges
in some numbers, interests will creep in which differ from
those we have set up as our ideals. But if we establish Swed­ish-
speaking lodges among the second generation the proper
Swedish spirit will remain and the Swedish heritage will not
be lost. To claim that a sense of Swedishness could be pre­served
if the Swedish language disappears is pure nonsense.
That would mean the end of a Swedish identity within two
generations, for the second generation lacks resistance and the
third has forgotten its origins and the Swedish cultural
accomplishments which their forefathers have carried out here
in America or in the homeland. . . . Therefore we must not
weary in our struggle for the preservation and maintenance of
the Swedish heritage, both in America and elsewhere in the
world.
15
"The better we succeed in upholding our language," he proclaimed
in 1931, "the more secure we may be in our wish to bring culture in
its various forms over to America."25
In 1933 Johannes Hoving brought out an impassioned article in
Nordstjernan accusing its editor, his "good friend" Vilhelm Berger, of
maintaining that the Swedish heritage could survive in America even
without the language, and that efforts to maintain the latter were
worse than useless. "What language is closest to us all?" he asked.
"Indeed, that language we learned as children.... Why then should
immigrants be brought by their own countrymen to the view that the
mother-tongue should be exchanged for English?. . . in the struggle
for culture the language of the fathers must be kept and passed on to
the children unto the third and fourth generations." This in turn led
him to a declaration of his fundamentally pluralist credo for America:
I do not believe in the future triumph of cosmopolitanism, but
rather of nationalism. Nor do I believe in the improvement of
the races of humanity through an unrestrained and uncon­trolled
mixing in the so-called melting pot, but instead in true
progress if the national groups here are preserved and intermix
as little as possible, which need not prevent them from being
good friends, helpful neighbors, and the like. Hold to your
forefathers' ways and customs as long as possible, as well as
the flowering of culture in all its forms, and above all else the
language. If the language is abandoned, ways and customs,
thoughts and feelings are changed within a couple of genera­tions.
But it need not come to that—as the example of other
countries shows—despite all the renegades may say or write.26
The "other countries" to which Hoving alluded were, of course,
Finland and Estonia, whose steadfast Swedish minorities were the
unfailing inspiration of the "All-Swedish movement and standing
reproach to the weak-willed "America-Swedes." His article mean­while
touches upon the growing preoccupation with "racial eugenics"
and the purity of the Germanic race which during these years he
propounded publicly and which took on an increasingly anti-Semitic
coloration. In 1933 he sympathized with the "revolution" that brought
Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists to power in Germany.27
Johannes Hoving's attack in Nordstjernan hardly did justice to its
editor, Vilhelm Berger, who had stated his views on the language
question in a series of articles in his newspaper in 1933, published in
book form as Svensk-Amerika i målbrottet (Swedish America at Its
Change of Voice) the same year. Like other realistic observers of
16
Swedish America by the 1930s, Berger had come to realize that the
old language could not be sustained indefinitely by artificial means
following the end of the great migration.28
A d i s t r i c t m e e t i n g of the V a s a O r d e r of A m e r i c a in N e w Y o r k , p r e s u m a b l y in t h e 1920s.
( F r o m J. H o v i n g , I svenskhetens tjänst, I I I . )
In 1933, Helga and Johannes Hoving led the third group pilgrim­age
of Vasa children to Sweden. Evidently due to the Depression,
only 25 children took part, all from the New York and Brooklyn Vasa
children's clubs, although some 70 such clubs had now been
established throughout the United States. All but four in the group
were girls, some of whom had participated in earlier tours. Some
were now in their teens. The former Swedish-American newspaper­man
Axel Fredenholm, editor for the RFSBU in Gothenburg, and his
wife served as cicerones, as they had in 1929. The tour, sponsored by
the RFSBU, covered much the same itinerary as the previous two,
and was received with the same enthusiasm by the press and public.29
Everywhere "the dominating Dr. Johannes Hoving with his
patriarchal beard and his lively Mrs. Helga," as Södermanlands läns
t i d n i n g (Nyköping) characterized them, were very much in the public
eye, and their frequent speeches and statements to the press show the
idealized picture of Swedish America—more aspiration than
17
reality—they were eager to convey in "Father's and Mother's land."
The doctor was, as before, at pains to stress a new blossoming of
ethnic life and appreciation for the benefits of cultural pluralism in
the United States. The old spirit of the "Small-Swedish" era, which
had driven Swedish Americans anxiously to abandon their old ways
and language, was a thing of the past, and they now felt a growing
pride in their origins, heritage, and old homeland, not least among
the younger generations.30
Johannes Hoving held a highly sanguine view of the importance
to America of its Swedish element. Barometern in Kalmar quoted him
as saying:
The Swedish stock has. . .spread across America so that the
whole northwestern part of North America is primarily of
Swedish origins. The Swedes have made significant contribu­tions
to America's development. As an example, the speaker
mentioned that three-quarters of the great world metropolis of
Chicago has been built by Swedes. Now the Swedes are well
and securely settled in America but they have not therefore
forgotten the land of their fathers. Talk about the loss of the
Swedish heritage is not in accord with the truth, the speaker
said. Swedish descendants there as a rule also learn their
mother-tongue.31
Repeatedly, Dr. Hoving emphasized growing interest in Sweden
and its heritage among the younger, American-born generations, to
which both the present tour and the rapid spread of Vasa children's
clubs throughout America bore witness. D a g e n s n y h e t e r in Stockholm
interviewed, together with the Hovings, an elderly Swedish American
who claimed, "In the [Vasa] Swedish children's clubs in America are
gathered most of the young people of Swedish descent between the
ages of five and twenty-five. There can be no complaints whatever
about Swedish interest, and the membership steadily increases."32
Swedish readers no doubt responded warmly when Johannes
Hoving declared in Växjö that children in the group kept asking,
"Why should we live in America when we have such a wonderful
country as Sweden?" Or when Helga told D a g e n s n y h e t e r in Stock­holm
that "the children feel more at home here than in their actual
homeland on the other side of the Atlantic." Some of the young
travelers made similar enthusiastic statements to the press. The two
million Swedes in America, Dr. Hoving proclaimed in Nyköping,
longed "in their souls" to return to Sweden.33
In Smålands allehanda (Jönköping), Carl Atterling, a one-time
18
Swedish-American newspaperman in Rockford, Illinois, sounded a
venerable note when he wrote:
The Vasa children were a group of Sweden enthusiasts. How
much do they not have to teach us here at home! Sometimes
we find proof of our tragic lack of enthusiasm and that we are
wanting in a sense of history is made manifest. Therefore the
appearance of these children is like a bright banner of youth
and a life-giving leaven to minds wearied by the unrest of our
times in this blessed land of peace. Perhaps they do not
themselves suspect what they give us of inspiration and fresh
promise. We have, in our awkwardness, usually not been able
to give them more than a recognizing glance when blue eyes
have met across the ocean, and a heart that must flow over.
They are, indeed, our own!34
Shortly after accompanying the Vasa children back to America, the
Hovings took the great step the doctor claimed they had long
contemplated, particularly since the beginning of the Depression, and
moved permanently back to Sweden in 1934. The reasons for their
departure at that time do not, however, emerge altogether clearly
from his memoirs. Persistent rumors within certain Swedish-Ameri­can
circles in New York—where the controversial physician had
always had his enemies—would have it that he was guilty of some
breach of professional ethics. His papers would meanwhile seem to
provide some explanation. In 1931 Hoving established an Institute of
Sexology, based according to its prospectus, on the Institut f ur
Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin "and a similar institute in Stockholm
Sweden," dedicated to the treatment of sexual dysfunctions. The
project seems hardly to have progressed beyond the planning stage.
But it doubtless seemed downright scandalous to many of his
compatriots in New York. To Hoving this may have been the last
straw.35
The couple left behind their two sons, one of whom, Walter, a
former All-American football player at Brown University, became a
leading New York corporation executive and socialite. The latter's
son, Thomas Hoving, would in time become a well-known and
controversial director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York.
The elder Hovings settled in the idyllic Hälsingland community
of Delsbo, where they promptly established a lodge of the Vasa Order
of America, before eventually moving to Stockholm.36 One may
imagine that the day on which Johannes Hoving, for the first time,
19
became a Swedish subject may have been the proudest in his life.
An immediate concern for him was the writing of his Läsebok och
uppslagsbok för Vasabarnen i A m e r i k a , a reader and reference book for
members of the Vasa children's clubs, for which he had long felt a
need and which he published in Stockholm in 1935. It described
Sweden's geography, nature, population, history, economy, and
culture, while also containing sections on the Swedes in the United
States and Canada. Extensive appendices provided biographical
information on notable Swedes in various spheres of activity, as well
as lists of literary and factual works, Swedish grammars, songs and
musical compositions, folk songs, games and dances, and details on
the Swedish Tourist Association (Svenska turistföreningen). There were
maps and illustrations. The lengthy historical sections were written
in the strongly National Romantic spirit so characteristic of the
author, while those dealing with more recent times stressed Sweden's
impressive progress in all areas, as well as the great contributions of
Swedes to American life. As ever, Hoving prophesied the sturdy
survival of the Swedish language and heritage in America and
admonished his young readers against ever marrying persons of
another race or nationality.37
In America, Johannes Hoving had often taken his Swedish-
American compatriots to task for their lack of zeal for the good cause.
During his later years in Sweden, however, he often rose to their
defense. Swedish Americans who sought to return permanently to
their old homeland, he indignantly complained in 1937, often felt they
were inhospitably received.
As a rule they find all paths closed—"they are not need­ed"—
and the positions they seek are occupied by persons who
to be sure are young but by no means competent to the same
degree as those who have acquired experience abroad. Many
of these deep-down very Swedish-minded overseas Swedes
again depart, but thanks to the cold treatment they have
encountered in Sweden, they are now especially bitter toward
their mother country.38
He now tended increasingly to idealize, justify, and defend them
in speech and writing. "Let us hope that the younger generation in
the motherland may learn better to appreciate its cousins over there
on the other side of the Atlantic," he wrote late in 1940. To this end
he brought out a 48-page booklet, D e n svenska kolonisationen i A m e r i k a
u n d e r 3 0 0 år (Swedish Colonization in America through 300 Years) the
same year. The word "colonization"—rather than settlement—was
20
characteristic. Throughout, this brief account was essentially a litany
of great names and deeds. In 1944, Hoving would declare that "a love
of the homeland such as is found among the Swedes in America you
would surely seek in vain here at home." He would continue to
lecture, periodically, on "great Swedish deeds in America" almost up
to his death in 1954.39
The end of World War II brought tragic consequences for the
Hovings. In 1924, during the first Vasa children's tour, Johannes
Hoving had taken the initiative in establishing in Gothenburg the first
Swedish lodge, No. 452, of the Vasa Order of America. By 1935 there
were already a half dozen such lodges in Sweden.40 In April 1945 he
was elected district master for Sweden. The satisfaction this surely
brought him was, however, short-lived, for the secretary of the
Stockholm lodge promptly accused him of having been a Nazi
sympathizer, a charge thereafter sensationalized by what Hoving
called the "Red" press and which he indignantly denied. Behind the
agitation he suspected a former Swedish consul general in New
York.41
The resulting scandal threatened to tear the organization apart.
Hoving and the district executive council suspended the Stockholm
lodge from membership in the order in May, an action subsequently
revoked by the grand master in the United States. Hoving and his
supporters thereupon proposed that the district secede to become a
purely Swedish organization. This failed to gain significant support,
and Hoving was suspended as district master by the order's grand
master. He formally resigned from the position in November that
year, to avoid further dissension, in his words. He and Helga
thereupon submitted their resignations to all the Vasa lodges in
which they were members, although the Grand Lodge and New York
District Lodge, as well as the St. Erik and Scandia Lodges, refused to
accept them. "And with that," Johannes Hoving wrote in his
memoirs, "the Vasa Order was a closed chapter as far as I was
concerned."42
How much truth may there have been in the allegations against
him? He was, of course, a staunch nationalist and had undeniably
held racist, including anti-Semitic views. He had initially welcomed
the National Socialist regime in Germany, and deeply feared both
Communism and the ancient enemy, Russia, to the east (which had
now seized his native city of Viborg). The press alleged in 1945 that
he had been involved in Swedish organizations of a racist and pro-
Nazi character, about which Hoving's memoirs say nothing. Much the
same might be—and was—said of not so few in Sweden, especially
on the political Right, during those years, even if many had eventual-
21
ly become disillusioned with Hitler's Germany.43
One may suspect, at least, that thanks to his prominence in the
Vasa Order with its strong American ties, Johannes Hoving made a
particularly convenient scapegoat at a time when the Swedish
national conscience was especially sensitive. Doubtless this contribut­ed
to the oblivion into which he and his wife have since fallen.
It is symptomatic that organizations as varied as the Swedish
Kennel and Mountaineering Clubs were then likewise purging their
memberships. As he had been during World War I in America,
Hoving was indignant over an atmosphere of hysterical witch-hunting,
which he now claimed to be unparalleled either in Sweden
or elsewhere in the world. The radical Stockholm newspaper
Aftonbladet, for instance, was indeed filled during 1945 with exposes
of known or suspected pro-Nazi individuals and groups. In the fall
of 1945, Dr. Hoving again faced denunciation, this time as an "active
Nazi," in the Swedish Medical Association. He and his wife nonethe­less
retained many friends, evidently including King Gustav V . 4 4
Henceforward Johannes Hoving devoted himself primarily to his
long-standing passion for genealogy, principally that of his own
family, and to the completion of his memoirs.45 It also gave him
obvious satisfaction to point out to Stockholm newspapers that in
1916 his wife and he had established the tradition of publicly
celebrating the Lucia custom in New York—a decade before the
practice was taken up in the Swedish capital.46
Helga Hoving died in September 1947, following a long illness.
Ever more oppressed by the thought that the victorious allies,
Roosevelt and Churchill, had sold out to Stalin and the "Asiatic
threat" from the East, Johannes Hoving followed her in death in
November 1954, at the age of 86. The press took little notice of his
passing.47
Ultimately, for all their dedicated vision, the Hovings had only
limited impact upon Swedish America. Throughout, their attitude
was essentially "overseas-Swedish," in keeping with the viewpoint of
Vilhelm Lundström and the RFSBU, rather than Swedish-American.
Indeed, Johannes Hoving was a unique example of an aspiring leader
of America's Swedish community imbued with the fortress mentality
of self-conscious historic ethnic minorities in the Eastern European
borderlands.48
The Hovings' social ambitions were meanwhile as great as their
cultural commitment. They moved in elite, cultivated Swedish circles
in the greater New York area, beyond which they seldom strayed.
They were particularly in their element at formal banquets and
receptions, preferably in honor of visiting dignitaries from Sweden,
22
and in accompanying groups of Vasa children on their much-publicized
tours of "Father's and Mother's Land."4 9 They were avid
for recognition, acclaim, and honor in the land where neither of them
had been born, but which for both ever remained the home of their
dreams and aspirations. Their contacts with Swedish America as a
whole remained remote and in large degree mutually uncomprehend­ing.
In the controversy with Vilhelm Berger over the preservation of
the Swedish language in America, meanwhile, not only did the
idealist confront the realist, but two eras stood in contrast to each
other. As such clear-eyed Swedish-American observers as Johan
Person and S. M. Hill had pointed out over the past two decades,
Swedish Americans tended increasingly to go their own ways and
were by now all too inclined to be skeptical toward self-appointed,
thus presumably self-interested, leaders in their midst. The era of the
"chieftain" was over in Swedish America, as it was indeed passing in
Sweden as well.50
Yet the Hovings left a living legacy. In recent decades crowds of
children have visited the land of their forebears—if now less often
"Father's and Mother's land"—under the auspices of the Vasa Order
and of other Swedish-American organizations. And on 13 December
each year candles sparkle on the crowns of innumerable Lucias, large
and small, in public celebrations from Seattle to SkeIIefteå
NOTES
1 Verner von Heidenstam, S v e n s k a r n a och deras hövdingar. Berättelser för unga och g a m l a .
2 vols. (Stockholm, 1908-10). Cf. Staffan Björck, H e i d e n s t a m och sekelskiftets Sveriga
(Stockholm, 1946).
2 Carl Sundbeck, S v e n s k - A m e r i k a lefve! Några tal hållna i A m e r i k a (Stockholm, 1904), 8-9;
G. N. Malm, C h a r l i Johnson, s v e n s k - a m e r i k a n . V e r k l i g h e t s b i l d ur folklifvet bland svenskarne
i V e s t e r n på 1 8 9 0 - t a l e t (Chicago, 1910), 226.
3 Johannes Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst. U r m i t t l i v s dagbok, 5 vols. (Stockholm 1944-53).
The first part of these memoirs appeared in a limited edition as S e x t i o år. M i t t livs
dagbok (Uppsala, 1928). Cf. Victor R. Greene, A m e r i c a n I m m i g r a n t headers, 1800-1910:
M a r g i n a l i t y and I d e n t i t y (Baltimore, 1987), esp. 75-83.
4 Johannes Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, I:9, 34-35. Regarding the Hoving family, see
Svenskt biografiskt lexikon, 19 (Stockholm, 1971-73), 421. On ethnicity in the Viborg
region, cf. Matti Klinge, Runebergs tvä f o s t e r l a n d (Helsingfors, 1983), 88-124.
5 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, II:185-96.
6 Erland Richter, Kära släkten i U . S . A . (Stockholm, 1923), 131. On Johannes Hoving's
earlier career, cf. Ernst Skarstedt, S v e n s k a m e r i k a n s k a folket i helg och socken (Stockholm,
1917), 194. See also Helga Hoving, T e a t e r m i n n e n och l i v s b i l d e r från olika länder
(Stockholm, 1937). There is a voluminous collection of the Hovings' papers at
Riksarkivet, Stockholm; additional materials are held by the Vasa Order of America
Archives, Bishop Hill, Illinois.
23
7 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, I:274, 278, 281, 289; II:12-13.
8 I b i d . , I:281. Cf obituary for Johannes Hoving in Svensk dagbladet (New York), 30 Nov.
1954.
9 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, I:302; II:16,146,179,184; III:19-20, 33-34, 41, 56-57.
10 I b i d . , II:184-85; III:41. Cf. Bengt Bogärde, V i l h e l m Lundström och s v e n s k h e t e n (Göteborg,
1992) and my review of it in S w e d i s h - A m e r i c a n H i s t o r i c a l Q u a r t e r l y , 44 (1993): 166-68;
also Björn Kummel, S v e n s k a r i all världen förenen eder! V i l h e l m Lundström och den
a l l s v e n s k a rörelsen (Åbo, 1994).
1 1 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, II:16.
12 I b i d . , II:153-54, 227, 241; III:19-20.
13 I b i d . , II:42,157-58. Cf. Gunnar Broberg, "Lundborgh, Herman," in S v e n s k t biografiskt
l e x i k o n , 24 (Stockholm), 1982-84, 234-39, and 'Statens institut för rasbiologi—tillkom¬
ståren," in [Gunnar Broberg, et al., eds.,] K u n s k a p e n s trädgård. O m i n s t i t u t i o n e r och
i n s t i t u t i o n a l i s e r i n g a r i v e t e n s k a p e n och livet (Stockholm, 1988), 178-221; Toms Hammar,
S v e r i g e åt s v e n s k a r n a . I n v a n d r i n g s p o l i t i k , u t l a n n i n g s k o n t r o l l och asylrätt 1 9 0 0 - 1 9 32
(Stockholm, 1964), 363-70.
1 4 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, II:16.
1 5 Cf. Johannes Hoving, V a s a b a r n e n s frän A m e r i k a t r e n n e resor i f a r s och m o r s l a n d 1 9 2 4,
1 9 2 9 , 1 9 3 3 . M i n n e n och i n t r y c k (Stockholm, 1935); Gunnar Wickman, Till fars och m o rs
l a n d . V a s a o r d e n s b a r n s k l u b b a r s S v e r i g e r e s a (Göteborg, 1924).
1 6 Hoving, V a s a b a r n e n , 13.
17 Ibid., 32.
1 8 Wickman, Till fars och m o r s l a n d , n.p.
1 9 Ibid., 21-22, 29, 62.
2 0 Hoving, V a s a b a r n e n , 23-24, 77-80.
21 I b i d . , 95-113, 217-18, 243.
22 I b i d . , 204, 242-43.
23 I b i d . , 120, 236-37.
24 I b i d . , 161.
2 5 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, III:32-35, 53, 56-57, 72.
26 I b i d . , III:125-27.
27 I b i d . , III:67-72, 93,126, 133; IV:71, 86-111,188-89; V:54.
2 8 Vilhelm Berger, S v e n s k - A m e r i k a i målbrottet (New York, 1933).
2 9 Hoving, V a s a b a r n e n , 260-61, 290, 397.
30 I b i d . , 280, 365, 367, 381-82, 385.
31 I b i d . , 318.
32 I b i d . , 280,290,318,373.
33 I b i d . , 313, 324, 329, 366, 373.
34 I b i d . , 341.
3 5 Johannes Hovings arkiv, 33, Riksarkivet, Stockholm Cf. "Perfect Mating is Plan of
New Sex Institute," N e w Y o r k E v e n i n g G r a p h i c , 14 Nov. 1931,1-M, 7 - M .
3 6 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, III:30. On Walter Hoving, see Adolph B. Benson and
Naboth Heden, eds., Swedes in A m e r i c a , 1 6 3 8 - 1 9 3 8 (New Haven, 1938), 597. Note also
Thomas Hoving, M a k i n g t h e M u m m i e s D a n c e (New York, 1993), which barely mentions
the author's grandparents and says nothing about their activities in America (83-84).
3 7 Johannes Hoving, Läsebok och u p p s l a g s b o k för V a s a b a r n e n i A m e r i k a (Stockholm, 1935),
esp. 133-34. Its similarity in patriotic tone to Swedish schoolbooks of the time is shown
by Herbert Tingsten, G u d och f o s t e r l a n d e t . S t u d i e r i h u n d r a års skolpropaganda (Stockholm,
1969).
3 8 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, IV:132.
39 I b i d . , IV:82,132,195,225, 226,228,232, 300,304; V:51-52,129-36,143,144-47,199-201;
Johannes Hoving, D e n svensk kolonisationen i A m e r i k a u n d e r 3 0 0 är och dess b e t y d e l s e för
24
A m e r i k a och S v e r i g e (Stockholm, 1940).
4 0 See the list of Swedish lodges, including officers, in Hoving, Läsebok för V a s a b a r n en
i A m e r i k a , 202.
4 1 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, V:14,17, 20-24, 26. Cf. Expressen (Stockholm), 12 Apr.,
21, 29 Oct. 1945; M o r g o n - T i d n i n g e n (Stockholm), 13 Apr. 1945; H e l s i n g b o r g s - P o s t e n , 16
Apr. 1945; L a n d s k r o n a p o s t e n , 16 Apr. 1945. The former consul general would have been
Olof Lamm, who held the position 1921-33 and was of Jewish background, whom
Hoving had accused of having subverted his Swedish cultural activities in New York.
See Hoving's letter of complaint to Foreign Minister Östen Undén, undated but
evidently from 1925, in Johannes Hovings samling, 8, Riksarkivet, Stockholm. On
Lamm, cf. S v e n s k t biografiskt lexikon, 22 (Stockholm, 1 9 7 7 - 7 9 ) , 200.
4 2 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, V:22, 24. See also open letter from Th. Lindblom to
Georg Grimsgård, Hälsingborg, 18 Apr. 1945, L o g e n 6 0 8 Kärnans m e d l e m s b l a d (Apr.
1945), n. p.; C. Georg I. Grimsgård to Th. Lindblom, Äppelviken, 25 Apr. 1945;
proclamation of District Lodge, Sweden, No. 19, Stockholm, 24 May 1945, suspending
the Stockholm lodge; M e d l e m s b l a d , L o g e n N r 5 8 9 , Stockholm ([Fall,] 1945), 2-5. I am
indebted to Kurt Rodin, Linköping, for providing material regarding this affair from
Vasa Ordens av Amerika, Logen 19, arkiv, B 64:1, Göteborgs landsarkiv, Göteborg.
4 3 See Holger Carlsson, N a z i s m e n i S v e r i g e . E t t v a r n i n g s o r d (Stockholm, 1942), esp. 119,
which mentions Hoving as having lectured the ultra-nationalist, pro-Nazi Manhem
Society. Hoving's papers include a few items, indicating two such lectures in 1937,
when he joined the society, remaining a member until at least the spring of 1942. See
Johannes Hoving's arkiv, 34, Riksarkivet, Stockholm. E. Wärenstam's F a s c i s m e n och
n a z i s m e n i S v e r i g e 1 9 2 0 - 1 9 4 0 (Uppsala, 1970) makes no mention of him.
4 4 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, IV-.248; V : l l , 19-21,84-94,112-17,164. Cf. Expressen, 12
Apr., 21, 29 Oct. 1945; M o r g o n - T i d n i n g e n , 13 Apr. 1945.
4 5 Note, for ex., Johannes Hoving, Släkten H o v i n g (Helsingfors, 1938). In 1948, Hoving
sought to demonstrate, with considerable ingenuity, that the actual father of the painter
Anders Zorn had been a Baron Louis Wrede. Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, V:97-lll.
4 6 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, V:75-76, 95-96,135-36.
4 7 On Hoving's discouragement and fears, see I b i d . , V:9, 23, 205. Obituaries in Svensk
dagbladet (Stockholm), 30 Nov., 1 Dec. 1954; D a g e n s n y h e t e r (Stockholm), 30 Nov. 1954.
4 8 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, II:158, 184-85.
4 9 Cf. Helga Hoving, T e a t e r m i n n e n och livsbilder, 195-215, 222-29.
5 0 Johan Person, S v e n s k - a m e r i k a n s k a s t u d i e r (Rock Island, III., 1912), 117; S. M. Hill,
"Ledareskapet I Svensk-Amerika," Yearbook of the S w e d i s h H i s t o r i c a l Society of A m e r i c a ,
1 9 1 4 - 1 9 1 5 (Chicago, 1915), 31-37. Cf. Skarstedt, Svensk-amerikanska folket i helg och socken,
11.
The author wishes to express his appreciation to the Southern Illinois University
Press for permission to make use here of material from his book, A F o l k D i v i d e d :
H o m e l a n d Swedes and S w e d i s h A m e r i c a n s , 1 8 4 0 - 1 9 4 0 (Carbondale, Ill., 1994).
25

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THE LAST CHIEFTAINS:
JOHANNES AND HELGA HOVING
H. ARNOLD BARTON
When Verner von Heidenstam wrote the history of the Swedish
people for Sweden's school children in 1908-09, he entitled his widely
read work S v e n s k a r n a och deras hövdingar (The Swedes and Their
Chieftains). Its underlying theme was that the Swedes were a
splendid race, capable of the highest deeds and greatest sacrifices,
provided that they had leaders capable of unifying and inspiring
them, as much through their strength of character as by the nobility
of the causes they served. There were many in Sweden who aspired
to such roles, not least Heidenstam himself, who gloried in the title,
"The National Poet" (Nationalskalden), ceremoniously bestowed upon
him in 1909. The great Swedish folk movements were each headed by
their venerated "seers and proclaimers of the Word."1 The phenome­non
was, of course, not unique to Sweden, but was characteristic of
the nineteenth-century Romantic view of history as the deeds of great
men writ large.
In Swedish America, too, the ideal of the hövding, or "chieftain,"
held its fascination, and the enthusiastic Swedish visitor Carl
Sundbeck indeed used that very term to describe its leadership in
1904. With the right leader, "the field-marshal, who saw the possibili­ties,
who knew his people, and who drove them on," the hero of G.
N. Malm's 1910 novel, Charli Johnson, svensk-amerikan, reflects, "it is
possible to carry out any great deed whatsoever, either at home or
abroad."2
Such early Swedish-American paladins as the Civil War colonel
Hans Mattson, Johan A. Enander, the editor of H e m l a n d e t in Chicago,
or Tufve Nilsson Hasselquist and Carl Aaron Swensson, Augustana
Lutheran pastors and college presidents, for instance, readily come to
mind. In contrast, the last of those who aspired to be chieftains in the
grand manner among America's Swedes, Dr. Johannes Hoving and
his wife Helga, are practically forgotten today, even by those well-versed
in Swedish-American history.
This circumstance is not without its irony, for although the better-known
Swedish-American leaders left to posterity some account of
5
their lives and work, their testimony seems meager indeed compared
with the five volumes of Dr. Hoving's autobiography, appropriately
entitled I svenskhetens tjänst (In the Service of the Swedish Heritage").
This massive work includes presumably every article the doctor ever
wrote and every speech he gave on Swedish-related topics in
America, as well as innumerable articles about him and his wife from
the Swedish and Swedish-American press.3
Johannes H o v i n g in 1 9 3 4 . ( F r o m J. H o v i n g , I svenskhetens tjänst, I I I . )
Johannes and Helga Hoving are all the more noteworthy since
neither came originally from Sweden. The son of parents from
6
Sweden, Johannes Hoving was born in 1868 in Finland, in the
traditionally cosmopolitan city of Viborg (Viipuri), near St. Peters­burg,
whose patrician class was traditionally conversant in German,
Swedish, Finnish, and Russian. Hoving spoke all four. In this
multilingual society, individual ethnicity was largely a matter of
choice. In his memoirs Hoving stated how in his youth he made his
commitment:
Already then I had the warm and intense feeling that my
Swedish language would be my most cherished inheritance
from the time of my forefathers and that all other languages
were nothing in comparison with Swedish. . . . The whole
struggle for Swedish language and culture, for which at that
time minds were as yet far from fully awakened, has through­out
my life since then inspired my heart and soul.4
After studying medicine in Berlin and Stockholm, he became a
physician in 1898.
His wife, Helga (née Adamsen), was born in Copenhagen of partly
Swedish but mainly Danish descent. She was raised in Stockholm and
had enjoyed a successful career on the Swedish stage before marrying
the Finland-Swedish doctor. In 1903, the couple was forced to flee
Finland, Hoving maintained, due to his opposition to the Russifi­cation
campaign in the Grand Duchy, since 1809 under the overlord-ship
of the tsar. When a brief stay in Sweden and a visit to Germany
and Austria did not bring to light any promising prospects, they
emigrated the same year to New York, despite Hoving's misgivings.
"Like everyone at that time," he later recalled, "I regarded America
as a land to which one should go only in case of extreme need, since
one was regarded as a freebooter, or something still worse, if one
ever went there to settle."5
Dr. Hoving entered medical practice in New York, where he and
his wife would remain until 1934. Within a few years, they became
passionately involved in those Swedish-related activities which would
become their main focus in America. These were so all-encompassing
that the visiting Swedish journalist Erland Richter doubted in 1923
that they had ever yet dreamed a dream in English. "If so," he added,
"they plead for absolution."6 Despite their origins, the Hovings
meanwhile seem to have shown no particular interest in either
specifically Finland-Swedish or Danish activities in America.
At the beginning of World War I, before America's entry, Johannes
Hoving was outspoken in his support of the German cause and
American neutrality; this in time brought unpleasant social conse-
7
quences. In 1915, while serving on the committee for the Swedish
section of an organization called the Friends of Peace, he was
instrumental in collecting over 32,000 Swedish-American signatures
for a peace petition, including the memberships of 81 lodges of the
Vasa Order of America. In 1916, the Hovings joined Vasa Order in
New York.7
H e l g a H o v i n g in Vingåker D r e s s , 1 9 2 6 . ( F r o m J. H o v i n g , I svenskhetens tjänst, I I . )
The St. Erik Lodge, which the Hovings helped to organize, became
the principal forum for their crusade in defense of svenskhet in
America, reinforced by an elite inner circle, S:t Eriks Förbundet (the
Saint Erik Society). In time, they also became active in, among other
8
things, the Swedish Cultural Society of America and the Jenny Lind
Association of New York. Their efforts, Johannes Hoving proudly
recalled, were not regarded kindly by many Swedish Americans, who
prematurely considered their cause a lost one.8
Dr. Hoving soon became a frequent, featured speaker at Vasa
Order and other Swedish-American functions in the Northeast, as
well as a contributor to both Swedish and Swedish-American
newspapers, particularly Nordstjernan in New York. He was con­vinced
that following the wartime hysteria, Swedish-American pride
and self-assertiveness were once again on the rise. He was thus
strongly critical of the Swedish-American churches, especially of the
Augustana Lutheran Synod, for their weak-willed concessions in the
language question; in his view, their historic mission was at least as
much cultural as spiritual. He therefore placed his greatest hopes in
the secular societies, above all the Vasa Order, which he wished
might ultimately unify the whole Swedish-American community,
while serving as the new bulwark of Swedish language and culture.9
Dr. Hoving stated his credo perhaps most succinctly in January
1921 at a Vasa lodge meeting in Brooklyn:
Common descent has united all who have the same language,
the same cultural development, and the same historic memo­ries.
He need not be regarded as a worse Swede, who by Fate's
decree has been born in a land or part of the world other than
Sweden, so long as he or she is of Swedish blood and has
Swedish interests.
To add emphasis to this assertion, he spoke of the unshakable loyalty
of the ancient Swedish element in Finland and Estonia, which in
Sweden so greatly inspired the "All-Swedish" ideal of the Society for
the Preservation of Swedish Culture in Foreign Lands (Riksföreningen
för svenskhetens bevarande i utlandet)—hereafter the RFSBU— estab­lished
in 1908 and its revered chieftain, Professor Vilhelm Lund­ström.
10
In 1921, Helga Hoving established the Vasa Order's first children's
group, soon known as the Elsa Rix Children's Club, within the St.
Erik Lodge. This was followed shortly by the "Vårblomman" (Spring
Flower) Club in Brooklyn. Through the 1920s and 1930s the Hovings
became increasingly convinced that Swedish language and culture
could only be perpetuated by inculcating them at an early age. In this
regard, parents had a moral obligation, as Johannes Hoving declared
in a speech to the Swedish Engineers' Society in New York shortly
after the end of World War I.
9
By keeping to Swedish as their conversational language with
their children, parents are also able to maintain a certain
authority over them, for the children will only later, if they
make the effort, gain as great, or greater, proficiency in
Swedish than their parents have. If, meanwhile, we speak
English with them, they most often gain a certain ascendancy
over us and feel themselves superior, if, for instance, we do
not speak the proper American English they learn in school.
And in this way can the first unwitting step be taken in the
wrong direction . . . through false reasoning they may then get
the distorted idea that Sweden and everything Swedish are
inferior to everything American in other respects as well.11
Swedish children's clubs would provide a powerful support to
parental authority. Writing in Nordstjernan of the first public
performance by Helga's little group in January 1921, Hoving
explained:
In this manner, through Swedish children's songs, through the
recitation of the works of Swedish poets and authors, and
through the performance of Swedish folk dances and dance-games,
it will be possible to awaken the minds and hearts of
the children to the glories of the ancient Swedish culture—and
the children will not be lost to the Swedish heritage.12
For the Hovings, the preservation of Swedish language and
culture was a self-evident end in itself. Beyond that, Johannes
Hoving's thinking is somewhat unclear. Like many at the time, he
was much influenced by quasi-scientific theories of Nordic racial
superiority. In 1922 he enthusiastically hailed "the world's first
institute for racial biology" in Uppsala, under Professor Herman
Lundborg, the prophet of a movement present-day Swedes would
just as soon forget. Swedish Americans, he declared in a speech in
Worcester, Massachusetts, in July 1922, should change their thinking
about their own race, "so that we do not regard ourselves, for
instance, as closer to Americans of other racial origins than to those
of our own blood."13
In sum, he held, as he declared before the Vasa Lodge in Stam­ford,
Connecticut, in November 1922, that "we make this country, the
United States, a better and richer land, and the American nation, to
which we ourselves belong, a stronger and nobler nation by giving
it a Swedish element in its future development." To do this, however,
demanded that Swedish Americans keep their ancestral culture vital
10
and their blood strains pure.14
The Hovings' most memorable accomplishment was their
organizing and escorting three groups of young visitors from the
Vasa Order of America's children's clubs to "Father's and Mother's
Land" in 1924, 1929, and 1933, under the sponsorship of the RFSBU.
In contrast to the often guarded reserve encountered by ordinary
Swedish Americans who revisited their homeland during these years,
the youngsters received the most enthusiastic, indeed rapturous,
welcome in Sweden. In particular, the first group of 45 children form
the original New York and Brooklyn clubs, accompanied by several
mothers, created a sensation in 1924, as recorded not only by Dr.
Hoving but also by the former Swedish-American journalist Gunnar
Wickman.15
The purpose of this tour was explained by G. Hilmer Lundbeck,
head of the New York office of the Swedish-America Line, in a
circular letter to the Vasa lodges:
This ought to be a campaign of conquest by the Vasa Order in
old Sweden! Our children will take them by storm there at
home. Not because they can accomplish so much or teach them
back home anything they themselves cannot do much better,
but because they will see, there at home, that we here in
America keep up our traditions and wish to preserve our
Swedish heritage in the second, third, and fourth generations.16
Dressed in their Swedish folk costumes, the youngsters sang
Swedish songs and performed Swedish dance and "dance-games" to
large and appreciative audiences in many localities in Sweden. Little
Oscar Thorngren was a particular success when he recited in
Swedish:
I am but a little lad
and little wisdom have I gained.
But some day, when grown I am
And more have learned from Father and from Mother,
of the land where Viking sails have swelled
and the cradles of Caroline heroes stood—
of the land where steadfastness, honesty, and courage
are changeless as the Giant's realm. . . .
then will I—in tender tones and trumpet blast—
tell of Sweden, land of saga in the North!. . .17
On such occasions, there were few dry eyes in the house.
11
T h e H o v i n g s with the V a s a O r d e r c h i l d r e n at t h e John E r i c s o n m a u s o l e u m in F i l i p s t a d , 1 9 2 4 .
( F r o m J. H o v i n g , I svenskhetens tjänst, II.)
The Hovings and the Vasa children were widely feted. In 1924
they were received both by the primate of the Swedish state church,
Archbishop Nathan Söderblom, and by King Gustav V himself. To
"reconquer, linguistically and culturally" as many as possible of the
children of "overseas Swedes" must be a fundamental concern for all
Swedes, Professor Vilhelm Lundström, chieftain of the RFSBU,
declared, adding that the loving reception of the children in Father's
and Mother's land should "at least dispel the misconception that the
Swedish American is not received with open arms and warm heats
here at home."18
On numerous festive occasions, the children and their public were
addressed by local notables who underlined the significance of their
visit. "Swedish children!," the burgomaster of Marstrand, Nils von
Zweigbergh, declared:
Indeed, in the word Swedish lies all the deep meaning of our
warm greeting. . . . may you then, in the depth of your souls
remember that you are Swedish children and may you. . . feel
that, as one of our great skalds sings, "Sweden, Sweden,
Sweden, Fatherland" is also the "home of your yearning," your
12
home on earth."
"In you we. see homeland Swedes," the chairman of the RFSBU
chapter in Uddevalla, Captain Gustaf Uddgren, told them, "children
of our own stock, blood of our blood, flesh of our flesh.... And you
yourselves, young friends, as you now journey through our fair land
and often feel, as I hope, the presence of Sweden's ancient culture,
remember that this culture is your rightful inheritance as much as it
is ours." He called upon his young listeners never to forget that "you
also have strong roots in 'Father's and Mother's Land,' and that this
land feels about you and has the same demands upon you as if you
still belonged to it entirely and undividedly.""
In Gothenburg, Professor Vilhelm Lundström—at the time fiercely
critical of the Augustana Synod for its gradual abandonment of the
Swedish language—told the Vasa children that their visit overcame
the weariness he often felt, and gave him hope for the future of he
Swedish race, "now that we have found each other again."
In an article published in some twenty Swedish newspapers
following the group's return to America, Lundström expatiated upon
its significance. That "forty [sic] children of Swedish descent in the
second and third generations come to Sweden for the purpose of
showing that they have been brought up to feel solidarity with the
Swedish language and the Swedish motherland is something most
remarkable and promising for the future." They now returned as
"forty little prophets for the Swedish heritage" to homes where this
might have weakened, to reawaken their parents' slumbering love."
From this small beginning great things should come. The children's
tour should bring the Swedes at home to the realization that "the
spiritual reconquest of the three million overseas Swedes is the
greatest national task of our generation."20
The first Vasa children's tour indeed aroused much enthusiasm in
Swedish America, and especially within the Vasa Order, as witnessed
by the establishment after 1924 of numerous new Vasa children's
clubs throughout the United States. By 1929, when the Hovings led
their second group to Sweden, there were already 35 such clubs
throughout the country, and the participants came from several
states.
The second tour followed, generally, in the footsteps of the first
and enjoyed the same heartwarming success with the press and
public. The young visitors were delighted with Sweden. "When I first
set foot on my parents' ancestral soil," a girl from New York wrote
afterwards, "it was as if it were not a foreign country." Sweden, a
boy from Detroit wrote, "was the land of my dreams and I wanted
13
to go there. When I had seen it, I didn't want to come back to
America. I thought the time there was so short. And now I long only
to return to Sweden again."21
In his numerous speeches during the tour, Johannes Hoving
repeatedly expressed his conviction that the preservation of ancestral
language and traditions by America's immigrant groups was essential
for the maintenance of social order. The hard Americanization
campaign, which had caused much of the second generation to go
over entirely to English had destroyed parental influence, resulting
in tragic family conflicts and in some cases in the disillusioned return
of the parents to their homelands. Left to themselves, the children
from such families fell under evil influences, accounting for the fact
that "87%" of the crime committed in the United States was now
attributed to second-generation immigrants. A new approach to
America's immigrant population was therefore emerging.
Americanization must take place in such a manner that family
bonds are not broken. The immigrants' home languages should
be preserved and the children encouraged to hold to their
parents' languages, thereby serving as intermediaries between
the culture of their parents' old homelands and that culture
which is evolving in America.
For this reason, the Vasa children's clubs were now highly esteemed
and were steadily increasing.22
The 1929 Vasa children's tour coincided with the arrival in Sweden
of some 900 former inhabitants of the village of Gammalsvenskby in
southern Russia. The presence in the homeland of representatives of
the Swedish Diaspora from both East and West naturally called forth
editorial comment in the press. Johannes Hoving made a kind of
pious pilgrimage to visit the newly arrived villagers from the
steppe—these ultimate Swedes—in their camp in Jönköping. After
reflecting how their ancestors had first settled on the Estonian island
of Dagö during the Middle Ages, then migrated to southern Russia
in the eighteenth century, he marveled:
Despite the oppression their forefathers have been subjected to
through the centuries in Russia, they have not lost their
original nationality. Try to claim, then, that Swedish customs
and language cannot survive for centuries, even under
unbearable external and internal political circumstances!
When he told the refugees of efforts to uphold the Swedish
14
heritage in America, they warmly approved. "This, they considered,
ought to work for the Swedish Americans as well as they [them­selves]
had managed to succeed over the centuries." Here, surely,
Hoving saw his most cherished dream for the future of svenskhet in
America.23
"Does it, or does it not, have any significance whether our kinfolk
abroad keep, develop, and defend their Swedish characteristics, and
that they are proud of their Swedish origins?" Köpings-Posten asked,
apropos of the children's tour. "Indeed it does! That such is the case
is the most powerful proof of the vitality and inner strength of the
old Swedish culture and a demonstration that this culture can well
hold its place for generations in competition on foreign ground."24
These were cries from the heart at a time when the end of the
Great Migration meant that for coming generations, "Father's and
Mother's Land" would be A m e r i c a .
The 1930s witnessed the last great debate over the preservation of
the Swedish language in America, between Johannes Hoving and
Vilhelm Berger in New York. Dr. Hoving naturally represented the
traditional ideal of ethnic maintenance in America. In a speech given
in New York in 1930, and printed in several Swedish-American
newspapers, he sternly took his compatriots in America to task for
failing, in their complacency, to rally in a great common effort to
uphold their language and heritage. He berated the churches for their
refusal to "cooperate" in this regard. He meanwhile categorically
opposed the establishment of English-speaking Vasa lodges to attract
the younger generations.
For as soon as we have created such English-speaking lodges
in some numbers, interests will creep in which differ from
those we have set up as our ideals. But if we establish Swed­ish-
speaking lodges among the second generation the proper
Swedish spirit will remain and the Swedish heritage will not
be lost. To claim that a sense of Swedishness could be pre­served
if the Swedish language disappears is pure nonsense.
That would mean the end of a Swedish identity within two
generations, for the second generation lacks resistance and the
third has forgotten its origins and the Swedish cultural
accomplishments which their forefathers have carried out here
in America or in the homeland. . . . Therefore we must not
weary in our struggle for the preservation and maintenance of
the Swedish heritage, both in America and elsewhere in the
world.
15
"The better we succeed in upholding our language," he proclaimed
in 1931, "the more secure we may be in our wish to bring culture in
its various forms over to America."25
In 1933 Johannes Hoving brought out an impassioned article in
Nordstjernan accusing its editor, his "good friend" Vilhelm Berger, of
maintaining that the Swedish heritage could survive in America even
without the language, and that efforts to maintain the latter were
worse than useless. "What language is closest to us all?" he asked.
"Indeed, that language we learned as children.... Why then should
immigrants be brought by their own countrymen to the view that the
mother-tongue should be exchanged for English?. . . in the struggle
for culture the language of the fathers must be kept and passed on to
the children unto the third and fourth generations." This in turn led
him to a declaration of his fundamentally pluralist credo for America:
I do not believe in the future triumph of cosmopolitanism, but
rather of nationalism. Nor do I believe in the improvement of
the races of humanity through an unrestrained and uncon­trolled
mixing in the so-called melting pot, but instead in true
progress if the national groups here are preserved and intermix
as little as possible, which need not prevent them from being
good friends, helpful neighbors, and the like. Hold to your
forefathers' ways and customs as long as possible, as well as
the flowering of culture in all its forms, and above all else the
language. If the language is abandoned, ways and customs,
thoughts and feelings are changed within a couple of genera­tions.
But it need not come to that—as the example of other
countries shows—despite all the renegades may say or write.26
The "other countries" to which Hoving alluded were, of course,
Finland and Estonia, whose steadfast Swedish minorities were the
unfailing inspiration of the "All-Swedish movement and standing
reproach to the weak-willed "America-Swedes." His article mean­while
touches upon the growing preoccupation with "racial eugenics"
and the purity of the Germanic race which during these years he
propounded publicly and which took on an increasingly anti-Semitic
coloration. In 1933 he sympathized with the "revolution" that brought
Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists to power in Germany.27
Johannes Hoving's attack in Nordstjernan hardly did justice to its
editor, Vilhelm Berger, who had stated his views on the language
question in a series of articles in his newspaper in 1933, published in
book form as Svensk-Amerika i målbrottet (Swedish America at Its
Change of Voice) the same year. Like other realistic observers of
16
Swedish America by the 1930s, Berger had come to realize that the
old language could not be sustained indefinitely by artificial means
following the end of the great migration.28
A d i s t r i c t m e e t i n g of the V a s a O r d e r of A m e r i c a in N e w Y o r k , p r e s u m a b l y in t h e 1920s.
( F r o m J. H o v i n g , I svenskhetens tjänst, I I I . )
In 1933, Helga and Johannes Hoving led the third group pilgrim­age
of Vasa children to Sweden. Evidently due to the Depression,
only 25 children took part, all from the New York and Brooklyn Vasa
children's clubs, although some 70 such clubs had now been
established throughout the United States. All but four in the group
were girls, some of whom had participated in earlier tours. Some
were now in their teens. The former Swedish-American newspaper­man
Axel Fredenholm, editor for the RFSBU in Gothenburg, and his
wife served as cicerones, as they had in 1929. The tour, sponsored by
the RFSBU, covered much the same itinerary as the previous two,
and was received with the same enthusiasm by the press and public.29
Everywhere "the dominating Dr. Johannes Hoving with his
patriarchal beard and his lively Mrs. Helga," as Södermanlands läns
t i d n i n g (Nyköping) characterized them, were very much in the public
eye, and their frequent speeches and statements to the press show the
idealized picture of Swedish America—more aspiration than
17
reality—they were eager to convey in "Father's and Mother's land."
The doctor was, as before, at pains to stress a new blossoming of
ethnic life and appreciation for the benefits of cultural pluralism in
the United States. The old spirit of the "Small-Swedish" era, which
had driven Swedish Americans anxiously to abandon their old ways
and language, was a thing of the past, and they now felt a growing
pride in their origins, heritage, and old homeland, not least among
the younger generations.30
Johannes Hoving held a highly sanguine view of the importance
to America of its Swedish element. Barometern in Kalmar quoted him
as saying:
The Swedish stock has. . .spread across America so that the
whole northwestern part of North America is primarily of
Swedish origins. The Swedes have made significant contribu­tions
to America's development. As an example, the speaker
mentioned that three-quarters of the great world metropolis of
Chicago has been built by Swedes. Now the Swedes are well
and securely settled in America but they have not therefore
forgotten the land of their fathers. Talk about the loss of the
Swedish heritage is not in accord with the truth, the speaker
said. Swedish descendants there as a rule also learn their
mother-tongue.31
Repeatedly, Dr. Hoving emphasized growing interest in Sweden
and its heritage among the younger, American-born generations, to
which both the present tour and the rapid spread of Vasa children's
clubs throughout America bore witness. D a g e n s n y h e t e r in Stockholm
interviewed, together with the Hovings, an elderly Swedish American
who claimed, "In the [Vasa] Swedish children's clubs in America are
gathered most of the young people of Swedish descent between the
ages of five and twenty-five. There can be no complaints whatever
about Swedish interest, and the membership steadily increases."32
Swedish readers no doubt responded warmly when Johannes
Hoving declared in Växjö that children in the group kept asking,
"Why should we live in America when we have such a wonderful
country as Sweden?" Or when Helga told D a g e n s n y h e t e r in Stock­holm
that "the children feel more at home here than in their actual
homeland on the other side of the Atlantic." Some of the young
travelers made similar enthusiastic statements to the press. The two
million Swedes in America, Dr. Hoving proclaimed in Nyköping,
longed "in their souls" to return to Sweden.33
In Smålands allehanda (Jönköping), Carl Atterling, a one-time
18
Swedish-American newspaperman in Rockford, Illinois, sounded a
venerable note when he wrote:
The Vasa children were a group of Sweden enthusiasts. How
much do they not have to teach us here at home! Sometimes
we find proof of our tragic lack of enthusiasm and that we are
wanting in a sense of history is made manifest. Therefore the
appearance of these children is like a bright banner of youth
and a life-giving leaven to minds wearied by the unrest of our
times in this blessed land of peace. Perhaps they do not
themselves suspect what they give us of inspiration and fresh
promise. We have, in our awkwardness, usually not been able
to give them more than a recognizing glance when blue eyes
have met across the ocean, and a heart that must flow over.
They are, indeed, our own!34
Shortly after accompanying the Vasa children back to America, the
Hovings took the great step the doctor claimed they had long
contemplated, particularly since the beginning of the Depression, and
moved permanently back to Sweden in 1934. The reasons for their
departure at that time do not, however, emerge altogether clearly
from his memoirs. Persistent rumors within certain Swedish-Ameri­can
circles in New York—where the controversial physician had
always had his enemies—would have it that he was guilty of some
breach of professional ethics. His papers would meanwhile seem to
provide some explanation. In 1931 Hoving established an Institute of
Sexology, based according to its prospectus, on the Institut f ur
Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin "and a similar institute in Stockholm
Sweden," dedicated to the treatment of sexual dysfunctions. The
project seems hardly to have progressed beyond the planning stage.
But it doubtless seemed downright scandalous to many of his
compatriots in New York. To Hoving this may have been the last
straw.35
The couple left behind their two sons, one of whom, Walter, a
former All-American football player at Brown University, became a
leading New York corporation executive and socialite. The latter's
son, Thomas Hoving, would in time become a well-known and
controversial director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York.
The elder Hovings settled in the idyllic Hälsingland community
of Delsbo, where they promptly established a lodge of the Vasa Order
of America, before eventually moving to Stockholm.36 One may
imagine that the day on which Johannes Hoving, for the first time,
19
became a Swedish subject may have been the proudest in his life.
An immediate concern for him was the writing of his Läsebok och
uppslagsbok för Vasabarnen i A m e r i k a , a reader and reference book for
members of the Vasa children's clubs, for which he had long felt a
need and which he published in Stockholm in 1935. It described
Sweden's geography, nature, population, history, economy, and
culture, while also containing sections on the Swedes in the United
States and Canada. Extensive appendices provided biographical
information on notable Swedes in various spheres of activity, as well
as lists of literary and factual works, Swedish grammars, songs and
musical compositions, folk songs, games and dances, and details on
the Swedish Tourist Association (Svenska turistföreningen). There were
maps and illustrations. The lengthy historical sections were written
in the strongly National Romantic spirit so characteristic of the
author, while those dealing with more recent times stressed Sweden's
impressive progress in all areas, as well as the great contributions of
Swedes to American life. As ever, Hoving prophesied the sturdy
survival of the Swedish language and heritage in America and
admonished his young readers against ever marrying persons of
another race or nationality.37
In America, Johannes Hoving had often taken his Swedish-
American compatriots to task for their lack of zeal for the good cause.
During his later years in Sweden, however, he often rose to their
defense. Swedish Americans who sought to return permanently to
their old homeland, he indignantly complained in 1937, often felt they
were inhospitably received.
As a rule they find all paths closed—"they are not need­ed"—
and the positions they seek are occupied by persons who
to be sure are young but by no means competent to the same
degree as those who have acquired experience abroad. Many
of these deep-down very Swedish-minded overseas Swedes
again depart, but thanks to the cold treatment they have
encountered in Sweden, they are now especially bitter toward
their mother country.38
He now tended increasingly to idealize, justify, and defend them
in speech and writing. "Let us hope that the younger generation in
the motherland may learn better to appreciate its cousins over there
on the other side of the Atlantic," he wrote late in 1940. To this end
he brought out a 48-page booklet, D e n svenska kolonisationen i A m e r i k a
u n d e r 3 0 0 år (Swedish Colonization in America through 300 Years) the
same year. The word "colonization"—rather than settlement—was
20
characteristic. Throughout, this brief account was essentially a litany
of great names and deeds. In 1944, Hoving would declare that "a love
of the homeland such as is found among the Swedes in America you
would surely seek in vain here at home." He would continue to
lecture, periodically, on "great Swedish deeds in America" almost up
to his death in 1954.39
The end of World War II brought tragic consequences for the
Hovings. In 1924, during the first Vasa children's tour, Johannes
Hoving had taken the initiative in establishing in Gothenburg the first
Swedish lodge, No. 452, of the Vasa Order of America. By 1935 there
were already a half dozen such lodges in Sweden.40 In April 1945 he
was elected district master for Sweden. The satisfaction this surely
brought him was, however, short-lived, for the secretary of the
Stockholm lodge promptly accused him of having been a Nazi
sympathizer, a charge thereafter sensationalized by what Hoving
called the "Red" press and which he indignantly denied. Behind the
agitation he suspected a former Swedish consul general in New
York.41
The resulting scandal threatened to tear the organization apart.
Hoving and the district executive council suspended the Stockholm
lodge from membership in the order in May, an action subsequently
revoked by the grand master in the United States. Hoving and his
supporters thereupon proposed that the district secede to become a
purely Swedish organization. This failed to gain significant support,
and Hoving was suspended as district master by the order's grand
master. He formally resigned from the position in November that
year, to avoid further dissension, in his words. He and Helga
thereupon submitted their resignations to all the Vasa lodges in
which they were members, although the Grand Lodge and New York
District Lodge, as well as the St. Erik and Scandia Lodges, refused to
accept them. "And with that," Johannes Hoving wrote in his
memoirs, "the Vasa Order was a closed chapter as far as I was
concerned."42
How much truth may there have been in the allegations against
him? He was, of course, a staunch nationalist and had undeniably
held racist, including anti-Semitic views. He had initially welcomed
the National Socialist regime in Germany, and deeply feared both
Communism and the ancient enemy, Russia, to the east (which had
now seized his native city of Viborg). The press alleged in 1945 that
he had been involved in Swedish organizations of a racist and pro-
Nazi character, about which Hoving's memoirs say nothing. Much the
same might be—and was—said of not so few in Sweden, especially
on the political Right, during those years, even if many had eventual-
21
ly become disillusioned with Hitler's Germany.43
One may suspect, at least, that thanks to his prominence in the
Vasa Order with its strong American ties, Johannes Hoving made a
particularly convenient scapegoat at a time when the Swedish
national conscience was especially sensitive. Doubtless this contribut­ed
to the oblivion into which he and his wife have since fallen.
It is symptomatic that organizations as varied as the Swedish
Kennel and Mountaineering Clubs were then likewise purging their
memberships. As he had been during World War I in America,
Hoving was indignant over an atmosphere of hysterical witch-hunting,
which he now claimed to be unparalleled either in Sweden
or elsewhere in the world. The radical Stockholm newspaper
Aftonbladet, for instance, was indeed filled during 1945 with exposes
of known or suspected pro-Nazi individuals and groups. In the fall
of 1945, Dr. Hoving again faced denunciation, this time as an "active
Nazi," in the Swedish Medical Association. He and his wife nonethe­less
retained many friends, evidently including King Gustav V . 4 4
Henceforward Johannes Hoving devoted himself primarily to his
long-standing passion for genealogy, principally that of his own
family, and to the completion of his memoirs.45 It also gave him
obvious satisfaction to point out to Stockholm newspapers that in
1916 his wife and he had established the tradition of publicly
celebrating the Lucia custom in New York—a decade before the
practice was taken up in the Swedish capital.46
Helga Hoving died in September 1947, following a long illness.
Ever more oppressed by the thought that the victorious allies,
Roosevelt and Churchill, had sold out to Stalin and the "Asiatic
threat" from the East, Johannes Hoving followed her in death in
November 1954, at the age of 86. The press took little notice of his
passing.47
Ultimately, for all their dedicated vision, the Hovings had only
limited impact upon Swedish America. Throughout, their attitude
was essentially "overseas-Swedish," in keeping with the viewpoint of
Vilhelm Lundström and the RFSBU, rather than Swedish-American.
Indeed, Johannes Hoving was a unique example of an aspiring leader
of America's Swedish community imbued with the fortress mentality
of self-conscious historic ethnic minorities in the Eastern European
borderlands.48
The Hovings' social ambitions were meanwhile as great as their
cultural commitment. They moved in elite, cultivated Swedish circles
in the greater New York area, beyond which they seldom strayed.
They were particularly in their element at formal banquets and
receptions, preferably in honor of visiting dignitaries from Sweden,
22
and in accompanying groups of Vasa children on their much-publicized
tours of "Father's and Mother's Land."4 9 They were avid
for recognition, acclaim, and honor in the land where neither of them
had been born, but which for both ever remained the home of their
dreams and aspirations. Their contacts with Swedish America as a
whole remained remote and in large degree mutually uncomprehend­ing.
In the controversy with Vilhelm Berger over the preservation of
the Swedish language in America, meanwhile, not only did the
idealist confront the realist, but two eras stood in contrast to each
other. As such clear-eyed Swedish-American observers as Johan
Person and S. M. Hill had pointed out over the past two decades,
Swedish Americans tended increasingly to go their own ways and
were by now all too inclined to be skeptical toward self-appointed,
thus presumably self-interested, leaders in their midst. The era of the
"chieftain" was over in Swedish America, as it was indeed passing in
Sweden as well.50
Yet the Hovings left a living legacy. In recent decades crowds of
children have visited the land of their forebears—if now less often
"Father's and Mother's land"—under the auspices of the Vasa Order
and of other Swedish-American organizations. And on 13 December
each year candles sparkle on the crowns of innumerable Lucias, large
and small, in public celebrations from Seattle to SkeIIefteå
NOTES
1 Verner von Heidenstam, S v e n s k a r n a och deras hövdingar. Berättelser för unga och g a m l a .
2 vols. (Stockholm, 1908-10). Cf. Staffan Björck, H e i d e n s t a m och sekelskiftets Sveriga
(Stockholm, 1946).
2 Carl Sundbeck, S v e n s k - A m e r i k a lefve! Några tal hållna i A m e r i k a (Stockholm, 1904), 8-9;
G. N. Malm, C h a r l i Johnson, s v e n s k - a m e r i k a n . V e r k l i g h e t s b i l d ur folklifvet bland svenskarne
i V e s t e r n på 1 8 9 0 - t a l e t (Chicago, 1910), 226.
3 Johannes Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst. U r m i t t l i v s dagbok, 5 vols. (Stockholm 1944-53).
The first part of these memoirs appeared in a limited edition as S e x t i o år. M i t t livs
dagbok (Uppsala, 1928). Cf. Victor R. Greene, A m e r i c a n I m m i g r a n t headers, 1800-1910:
M a r g i n a l i t y and I d e n t i t y (Baltimore, 1987), esp. 75-83.
4 Johannes Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, I:9, 34-35. Regarding the Hoving family, see
Svenskt biografiskt lexikon, 19 (Stockholm, 1971-73), 421. On ethnicity in the Viborg
region, cf. Matti Klinge, Runebergs tvä f o s t e r l a n d (Helsingfors, 1983), 88-124.
5 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, II:185-96.
6 Erland Richter, Kära släkten i U . S . A . (Stockholm, 1923), 131. On Johannes Hoving's
earlier career, cf. Ernst Skarstedt, S v e n s k a m e r i k a n s k a folket i helg och socken (Stockholm,
1917), 194. See also Helga Hoving, T e a t e r m i n n e n och l i v s b i l d e r från olika länder
(Stockholm, 1937). There is a voluminous collection of the Hovings' papers at
Riksarkivet, Stockholm; additional materials are held by the Vasa Order of America
Archives, Bishop Hill, Illinois.
23
7 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, I:274, 278, 281, 289; II:12-13.
8 I b i d . , I:281. Cf obituary for Johannes Hoving in Svensk dagbladet (New York), 30 Nov.
1954.
9 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, I:302; II:16,146,179,184; III:19-20, 33-34, 41, 56-57.
10 I b i d . , II:184-85; III:41. Cf. Bengt Bogärde, V i l h e l m Lundström och s v e n s k h e t e n (Göteborg,
1992) and my review of it in S w e d i s h - A m e r i c a n H i s t o r i c a l Q u a r t e r l y , 44 (1993): 166-68;
also Björn Kummel, S v e n s k a r i all världen förenen eder! V i l h e l m Lundström och den
a l l s v e n s k a rörelsen (Åbo, 1994).
1 1 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, II:16.
12 I b i d . , II:153-54, 227, 241; III:19-20.
13 I b i d . , II:42,157-58. Cf. Gunnar Broberg, "Lundborgh, Herman," in S v e n s k t biografiskt
l e x i k o n , 24 (Stockholm), 1982-84, 234-39, and 'Statens institut för rasbiologi—tillkom¬
ståren," in [Gunnar Broberg, et al., eds.,] K u n s k a p e n s trädgård. O m i n s t i t u t i o n e r och
i n s t i t u t i o n a l i s e r i n g a r i v e t e n s k a p e n och livet (Stockholm, 1988), 178-221; Toms Hammar,
S v e r i g e åt s v e n s k a r n a . I n v a n d r i n g s p o l i t i k , u t l a n n i n g s k o n t r o l l och asylrätt 1 9 0 0 - 1 9 32
(Stockholm, 1964), 363-70.
1 4 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, II:16.
1 5 Cf. Johannes Hoving, V a s a b a r n e n s frän A m e r i k a t r e n n e resor i f a r s och m o r s l a n d 1 9 2 4,
1 9 2 9 , 1 9 3 3 . M i n n e n och i n t r y c k (Stockholm, 1935); Gunnar Wickman, Till fars och m o rs
l a n d . V a s a o r d e n s b a r n s k l u b b a r s S v e r i g e r e s a (Göteborg, 1924).
1 6 Hoving, V a s a b a r n e n , 13.
17 Ibid., 32.
1 8 Wickman, Till fars och m o r s l a n d , n.p.
1 9 Ibid., 21-22, 29, 62.
2 0 Hoving, V a s a b a r n e n , 23-24, 77-80.
21 I b i d . , 95-113, 217-18, 243.
22 I b i d . , 204, 242-43.
23 I b i d . , 120, 236-37.
24 I b i d . , 161.
2 5 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, III:32-35, 53, 56-57, 72.
26 I b i d . , III:125-27.
27 I b i d . , III:67-72, 93,126, 133; IV:71, 86-111,188-89; V:54.
2 8 Vilhelm Berger, S v e n s k - A m e r i k a i målbrottet (New York, 1933).
2 9 Hoving, V a s a b a r n e n , 260-61, 290, 397.
30 I b i d . , 280, 365, 367, 381-82, 385.
31 I b i d . , 318.
32 I b i d . , 280,290,318,373.
33 I b i d . , 313, 324, 329, 366, 373.
34 I b i d . , 341.
3 5 Johannes Hovings arkiv, 33, Riksarkivet, Stockholm Cf. "Perfect Mating is Plan of
New Sex Institute," N e w Y o r k E v e n i n g G r a p h i c , 14 Nov. 1931,1-M, 7 - M .
3 6 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, III:30. On Walter Hoving, see Adolph B. Benson and
Naboth Heden, eds., Swedes in A m e r i c a , 1 6 3 8 - 1 9 3 8 (New Haven, 1938), 597. Note also
Thomas Hoving, M a k i n g t h e M u m m i e s D a n c e (New York, 1993), which barely mentions
the author's grandparents and says nothing about their activities in America (83-84).
3 7 Johannes Hoving, Läsebok och u p p s l a g s b o k för V a s a b a r n e n i A m e r i k a (Stockholm, 1935),
esp. 133-34. Its similarity in patriotic tone to Swedish schoolbooks of the time is shown
by Herbert Tingsten, G u d och f o s t e r l a n d e t . S t u d i e r i h u n d r a års skolpropaganda (Stockholm,
1969).
3 8 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, IV:132.
39 I b i d . , IV:82,132,195,225, 226,228,232, 300,304; V:51-52,129-36,143,144-47,199-201;
Johannes Hoving, D e n svensk kolonisationen i A m e r i k a u n d e r 3 0 0 är och dess b e t y d e l s e för
24
A m e r i k a och S v e r i g e (Stockholm, 1940).
4 0 See the list of Swedish lodges, including officers, in Hoving, Läsebok för V a s a b a r n en
i A m e r i k a , 202.
4 1 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, V:14,17, 20-24, 26. Cf. Expressen (Stockholm), 12 Apr.,
21, 29 Oct. 1945; M o r g o n - T i d n i n g e n (Stockholm), 13 Apr. 1945; H e l s i n g b o r g s - P o s t e n , 16
Apr. 1945; L a n d s k r o n a p o s t e n , 16 Apr. 1945. The former consul general would have been
Olof Lamm, who held the position 1921-33 and was of Jewish background, whom
Hoving had accused of having subverted his Swedish cultural activities in New York.
See Hoving's letter of complaint to Foreign Minister Östen Undén, undated but
evidently from 1925, in Johannes Hovings samling, 8, Riksarkivet, Stockholm. On
Lamm, cf. S v e n s k t biografiskt lexikon, 22 (Stockholm, 1 9 7 7 - 7 9 ) , 200.
4 2 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, V:22, 24. See also open letter from Th. Lindblom to
Georg Grimsgård, Hälsingborg, 18 Apr. 1945, L o g e n 6 0 8 Kärnans m e d l e m s b l a d (Apr.
1945), n. p.; C. Georg I. Grimsgård to Th. Lindblom, Äppelviken, 25 Apr. 1945;
proclamation of District Lodge, Sweden, No. 19, Stockholm, 24 May 1945, suspending
the Stockholm lodge; M e d l e m s b l a d , L o g e n N r 5 8 9 , Stockholm ([Fall,] 1945), 2-5. I am
indebted to Kurt Rodin, Linköping, for providing material regarding this affair from
Vasa Ordens av Amerika, Logen 19, arkiv, B 64:1, Göteborgs landsarkiv, Göteborg.
4 3 See Holger Carlsson, N a z i s m e n i S v e r i g e . E t t v a r n i n g s o r d (Stockholm, 1942), esp. 119,
which mentions Hoving as having lectured the ultra-nationalist, pro-Nazi Manhem
Society. Hoving's papers include a few items, indicating two such lectures in 1937,
when he joined the society, remaining a member until at least the spring of 1942. See
Johannes Hoving's arkiv, 34, Riksarkivet, Stockholm. E. Wärenstam's F a s c i s m e n och
n a z i s m e n i S v e r i g e 1 9 2 0 - 1 9 4 0 (Uppsala, 1970) makes no mention of him.
4 4 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, IV-.248; V : l l , 19-21,84-94,112-17,164. Cf. Expressen, 12
Apr., 21, 29 Oct. 1945; M o r g o n - T i d n i n g e n , 13 Apr. 1945.
4 5 Note, for ex., Johannes Hoving, Släkten H o v i n g (Helsingfors, 1938). In 1948, Hoving
sought to demonstrate, with considerable ingenuity, that the actual father of the painter
Anders Zorn had been a Baron Louis Wrede. Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, V:97-lll.
4 6 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, V:75-76, 95-96,135-36.
4 7 On Hoving's discouragement and fears, see I b i d . , V:9, 23, 205. Obituaries in Svensk
dagbladet (Stockholm), 30 Nov., 1 Dec. 1954; D a g e n s n y h e t e r (Stockholm), 30 Nov. 1954.
4 8 Hoving, I svenskhetens tjänst, II:158, 184-85.
4 9 Cf. Helga Hoving, T e a t e r m i n n e n och livsbilder, 195-215, 222-29.
5 0 Johan Person, S v e n s k - a m e r i k a n s k a s t u d i e r (Rock Island, III., 1912), 117; S. M. Hill,
"Ledareskapet I Svensk-Amerika," Yearbook of the S w e d i s h H i s t o r i c a l Society of A m e r i c a ,
1 9 1 4 - 1 9 1 5 (Chicago, 1915), 31-37. Cf. Skarstedt, Svensk-amerikanska folket i helg och socken,
11.
The author wishes to express his appreciation to the Southern Illinois University
Press for permission to make use here of material from his book, A F o l k D i v i d e d :
H o m e l a n d Swedes and S w e d i s h A m e r i c a n s , 1 8 4 0 - 1 9 4 0 (Carbondale, Ill., 1994).
25